Afghanistan crystallised as a territorial unit in the nineteenth
century. Some of the lands which make it up had long carried the
label ‘Afghanistan’ (Gille, 1997), but the label did not identify a
recognised state, but rather a realm in which people known as
‘Afghans’ (whom contemporary Western scholars call ‘Pushtuns’)
lived. The origin of the name ‘Afghan’ is itself a matter of specu-
lation (Vogelsang, 2002: 17–18), with some scholars tracing it to
a Persian word meaning ‘lamentation’ (see Dupree, 1973: xvii),
while another ingeniously derives it from the Greek epigoni, the
term used to refer to youths recruited by Alexander the Great from
towns on the territory of modern Afghanistan (Marigo, 1988).
Afghanistan as a political unit emerged as a buffer-state
between British India and the expanding Russian empire. The
great cities of Afghanistan – especially Herat and Balkh – had
long been widely known, not merely as neighbours of the great
Silk Road between Europe and China, but as targets of pillage by
the conquest empires such as the Chinggisid and the Timurid. Yet
the conquest empires were notoriously prone to fragment in the
face of succession struggles (Barfield, 1989), and by the
eighteenth century, winds of change were blowing in Central Asia,
winds powered by the development and expansion of the modern
bureaucratic state. Afghanistan did not feel these directly. It was
never subject to European colonial occupation, and only on rare
occasions, and with considerable cost, did European states seek to
pursue military campaigns upon its soil. None the less, its history
was to be shaped by interaction with London and Saint
Petersburg. The degree of consent given by powerholders within
Afghanistan to the processes by which Afghanistan’s boundaries
were fixed is highly debatable. The borders between Russia and
Afghanistan were largely demarcated through Anglo-Russian
negotiations in 1873 and 1887 (Fitzhardinge, 1968), and the legit-
imacy of the Durand Line’ – drawn in 1893 between India and
Afghanistan – was to be a major source of friction after the parti-
tion of the Indian subcontinent in 1947. None the less, by the
1950s, the reality of Afghanistan as a component of the inter-
national system was widely accepted.
The Road to War 7